Generation JPod

I’ve just got back from Kaş
where I spent a lovely few days celebrating Pinar and Simon’s
wedding
and while there spent a few hours reading Now We Are
40: a
thoughtful and entertaining look at everything from house music to
house prices from the perspective of Generation X.

While a lot of the book was familiar, I was surprised how different my
experience has been. I don’t feel part of the last generation who grew
up without digital technology, but part of the first generation to grow up
with it.

I learned to program at school, started writing code professionally at
18 and haven’t stopped. I didn’t work many
McJobs, but have worked in many
JPods (and seen friends move
to Vancouver to work in the games industry there). I may have bought my
first smartphone when I got my first job, but my life has
felt digital from the start.

One focus of “Now We Are 40” is the changes in music over the last few
decades from the pre-digital rave scene to the current over-saturation
of recorded music available from streaming services which has rendered
selling recorded music unsustainable for almost everyone. Food and
drink followed on as the next big thing, something I’ve experienced
personally as my
brother-in-law morphed
from hip hop pimp to sommelier. You may not need to buy
recorded music any more, but you still need to eat and drink.

In fact raves, clubs, cafes and restaurants are mostly a place to hang
out. When people were incredulous at the idea of spending real money
on virtual goods Cory and I used to point out
that most of what you were buying in Starbucks was not coffee or
service, but an experience just as ephemeral as a virtual
hat.

Virtual worlds like Second Life and now
Social
VR
showed that you could digitise the hanging out too. It’s already
proving to be an invaluable
lifeline to people
who find it hard to hang out in real life. While festivals, clubs and
gigs are where musicians are increasingly making money in real life,
they also work in virtual worlds. I first saw the
Qemists, now one of my favourite bands,
on the Ninja Tune stage at a festival in
Second Life organised by
Aleks. Later,
Leon poked me on Facebook to ask me to
advise his new tech startup because, after music and food, technology
is apparently the new rock and roll.

For most of my career I have been building experiences which
compliment the real world and working at Facebook is the first time
that I have felt like I might be working somewhere that has been
disrupting existing industries. The view that Facebook is an
existential threat to the open
web (a prospect
that Bryan likens to the bug sucking
the wildebeest dry) is relatively widespread and I remember a circle
forming around me when I told Aral and some of the
other web developers at a Skiff Christmas
party that I was going to work there.

In fact I’ve spent much of the last few years working on
opensource tools
that will benefit the wider web while also being able to support my family
more sustainably than I could working in a games industry where
redundancies and closures were more common than Philip
Rosedale being asked
how much he would sell Second Life for at Davos.

While the software industry seems to be constantly changing with new
tools, languages, platforms and frameworks arriving all the time, a
deeper disruption is potentially coming to the business of writing
code for a living. Increasingly large parts of software systems are
learned by machines rather than programed by
humans. As Jeff Dean
at Google observed: “If Google were created from scratch today, much
of it would be learned, not coded.” When I started studying Computer
Science in Nottingham my dad advised me not to become just a computer
caretaker. It’s very possible that I may end up becoming a computer
trainer instead.

One thing that is clear is that we need to work out how our
increasingly disrupted and automated society will function. If
software is eating the
world
and software is increasingly learned, then we’re going to have to find
a way for people to flourish in that future. Brexit and Trump show
what happens when people are worried about their place in the
world. I’d like to see my children grow up in a future which is closer
to the The Culture than
Mad Max. There’s a general
election in the UK next
week. My
next plan is to vote for a more progressive future.